The Game Dame

On Saturday my desktop’s monitor died. It went kablooey in the morning so I had to stare the rest of the day in the face without the prospect of WoW. I pouted until mid-afternoon.

By dinner time, I had come to the tough realization that I had been very addicted to WoW. I kept wandering around the apartment looking for… what? I don’t know. I was restless. I walked from the bedroom to the living room, into the office — and then made the entire circuit again and again. I petted the cats. One appreciated it, the other asked me, uncivilly, to shove off. I took two naps. My husband did his usual Saturday stuff, keeping an eye on me and wondering what he could do to cheer me up. My primary emotion was sadness. I missed my friends. I missed the automatic mindlessness of cranking up WoW when I didn’t know what else to do. Or, more often, when I didn’t want to face something else I had to do or think about. I felt lonely, having been jerked away from a social circle without my consent. I also felt unexplicably guilt-ridden, like I was letting someone down, but I didn’t know who it was.

Sunday was even harder. The entire day drew out before me like a long shadow at sunset — and felt just as cold. I dusted off Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the Xbox 360. I hated it. I started a new class 4 or 5 different times. I couldn’t get the hang of the controls. There were too many spells for the D-pad hotkeys (it’s probably a MUCH better game on the PC). The hint book I had bought last year is HORRIBLY written and I wasn’t finding it helpful at all. I kept wondering, “Why am I banging my head against this game??!?” And yet I continued to try. I felt compelled to fill up the brain-space.

Sunday is the one night a week we allow ourselves to splurge on a restaurant for dinner. We went to Panera. I tried making conversation with my husband about truly bizarre topics, mostly centered around facing one’s own limitations. Afterwards we browsed Barnes & Noble, a free pastime we both enjoy. There’s a Best Buy in the same shopping center and I begged for us to window-shop the monitors. “Oooo, pretty.” In the bookstore, I couldn’t get myself interested in anything I touched, fiction or nonfiction. I noted the horribly sad state of the SciFi/Fantasy genre (more on that in a future post). The predominating emotion was loss.

This morning I woke up cranky and resentful. Nothing pleased me. The weather was bleak, yet the holiday filled the parks and beaches too much for me to enjoy them. Again I tried playing Oblivion, this time finding a bit of enjoyment in it as I solved some of the frustrations (turning up the brightness so I didn’t get lost in caves, pausing the action a lot to switch spells, etc.). At some point in mid-afternoon I started to achieve a little peace. I cleaned off the top of my dresser. I sorted some clothes to take to Goodwill. I came up with the idea for this post and some others. I realized there are a lot of things I want to do around  the house on my I’ve-been-meaning-to list. I even started thinking that losing WoW might turn out to be a good thing for me in the long run.

By the way, thank you all for the kind comments and emails you’ve sent. They have definitely helped take some of the sting out of this whole situation.